New Media Consortium RSS

NMC Down Under in July!

Alan Levine — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:30:40 -0700

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

From July 5-20, 2008, the NMC leadership team of CEO Larry Johnson and Vice Presidents Rachel Smith and Alan Levine will be in Australia establishing a new phase of the Horizon Project and meeting with colleagues at our five Australian NMC member organizations. Look for a string of news stories and podcasts from this tour.

The primary purpose of the trip is the launch of Horizon.au -- a version of the Horizon project specifically focused on emerging technology in higher education for the Australia / New Zealand region. An advisory board has been convened and will meet face to face in Melbourne July 9-10 to generate the topics for a new Horizon Report. Like our other Horizon Projects, a majority of the work will take place openly in the wiki, and we invite interested persons to participate there by helping provide examples and tagging web resources.

While in Melbourne, we will be meeting with colleagues from University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who are also co-hosts for the Horizon.au meeting. We also will be participating in an iCampus regional meeting.

There will be another stop in Brisbane for meetings at new NMC member University of Queensland followed by 3 days in Sydney to meet with colleagues at the University of Sydney, new NMC Member University of New South Wales and our long standing NMC member organization at the University of Wollongong. Our colleague Angela Thomas at the University of Sydney has arranged a number of local meetings and a dinner with colleagues we have known virtually through our Second Life projects.

Keep tuned to the NMC News feed for more updates!

Collaborating Without Email?

Alan Levine — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:36:33 -0700

The NMC's listserv for our members, the NMCTAB, is frequently rated high in our surveys as a valuable service... but we are sure no one would mind getting information in fewer email messages. One effort we have been taking to better organize the discussions is to provide summaries of the more active discussions posted to the NMC web site.

Often, our members are looking for specific kinds of software or practices used at other institutions. While this information can be collected from email responses it is a tedious cut and paste operation, and generates a flood of email responses.

As an experiment, we took a simple recent request for sharing kinds of ePortfolio systems in use and their effect, if any, on accreditation, and rather than asking for email response, set it up as a form in Google Apps. This is a very simple process to set up, more or less creating a blank spreadsheet, and then using the share as form options to construct questions. This generates a form that is sent by email, linked or as below, we can even embed the form in a web site. The responses are automatically saved to the Google Spreadsheet, and thus are publicly viewable (if you provide that option), and even better, the results are all agreggated in single place. For quantitative questions, the results can be easily graphed.

In this way, we are able to collect information with a single email. In less than 2 hours we collected 13 responses, and they are continuing to arrive.

Are there other ways of using our new tools to collaborate more successfully? What do you use for collaboration in your work groups (that sounds like a survey we can create in Google Docs...)

Screen Capture Software for the Mac

Alan Levine — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:18:49 -0700

Can anyone suggest a Mac screen capture utility for creating presentations. Captivate and Camtasia are PC only and I was wondering what people were using on the Mac side.
Tom Haymes, Houston Community College Northwest

Matt Frank
I have used Snapz Pro and Screenflow. For simple things I would say that Snapz works better, but Screenflow has a built in editor which can save a lot of time if you have to edit your presentation video.

Bernadette Daly Swanson, University of California, Davis
I use the Grab software for screen captures that comes on the Mac.

For motion capture I use SnapzPro X.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Albert Matthews, University of Pennsylvania
Screen Flow is a must for Leopard:
http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/

and for Tiger and earlier, SnapzProX is pretty close:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Kathy Craven, Full Sail University

I recommend Screenflow or Snapz Pro. Screenflow allows you to edit right within in the application. As soon as you capture.

Jason Mellen, Bowling Green State University
SnapzX Pro is one that I know many people have used and recommend.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

A recent entry into the market it Screen Flow. I’ve done a project with their tool and was quite impressed.
http://varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/

Shawn Miller, George Mason University
We have been using Captivate on Intel Macs using Parallels Desktop For Mac with good success.

Shawn Zamechek, University of Pennsylvania
We use Screenflow from Vara Software and love it. It is Leopard only, but it takes advantage of all the new core animation/core video waka-waka found in Leopard's belly. The interface/performance is intuitive and simple, yet powerful.
http://varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/

On non- 10.5x machines we use Ambrosia's SnapzProX:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

This software kinda hijacks the key command for screen capture opens a window that allows for sectional screen grabs along with screen-casting w/ audio. It gets the job done.

Barry Albright, Brown University
Snapz X has worked well and it was recently updated for 10.5.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Tucker MacNeill, Carleton College
Screenflow... Screenflow.... Screenflow... (If you have Leopard).

We still have SnapzPro on our Tiger-lab machines, but after this summer's re-imaging, we're putting Leopard on all or machines, and going with Screenflow. It does the same thing Snapz and Wiretap Pro do, but in ONE piece of software. Want to make great 'teaching' videos? Create a Screenflow project with iSight capture, screen capture, system sound AND microphone sound. Or just do ONE of those things... Or do all of them, and edit one out. Bring in OTHER media from a folder. Record some now, record more later. Edit and release...

I can't tell you how amazing this piece of software is!

Linda Dobyns, Jefferson State Community College
I use Jing and it works great.
http://www.jingproject.com/

John Walber, LearningTimes
I'm a huge fan of SnapZ Pro.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Brian Hermann, Paradise Valley Community College
I have heard good things about this software:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Kevin Guiney, Harvard University
For screen capture I use iShow U and like it:
http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html

but have also heard good things about Screen Flow:
http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/

Jeffrey Anderson, Mesa Community College
Screenflow has the studio-capabilities that Camtasia has for the PC. IF you don't mind using your own editing suite (iMovie or Final Cut), and want to save some money try iShowU: http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html

The cost is 20 dollars vs. 99 for Screenflow

The NMC Symposium on Social Operating Systems

NMC — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:03:04 -0700

NMC Symposium on Social Operating Systems
November 4-6, 2008
Live Online via the Internet

A shift is taking place in the ways we search for, work with, and understand information as we begin to recognize that relationships and social networks are central to the ways we organize our work and our daily lives. Tools that place people at the center of the network, making people the focus around which our work products are organized, are starting to free us from the constraints of file systems that make more sense to computers than to humans. The NMC Symposium on Social Operating Systems will explore these ideas, look at emerging next-generation social networking tools and practices, and consider the implications that this profound shift in focus might have on education, the academy, and the larger world.

The event will be conducted entirely online. The NMC Symposium on Social Operating Systems is the eleventh in the ongoing series of specially focused online gatherings that explore new ideas and issues related to technology and learning. The NMC Series of Virtual Symposia is itself an exploration of emerging forms of collaboration and tools.

Look for more information here in the coming months. Meanwhile, save the dates. We look forward to hearing your voice in November!

Tweetwheel photo by Cogdog

2008 Pachyderm Conference

NMC — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:01:28 -0700

2008 Pachyderm Conference
September 23-25, 2008
San Antonio, Texas

The third annual Pachyderm Conference will be held September 23-25,2008, in lovely San Antonio, Texas! Each year, museum and campus leaders, trustees, and educators come together for a series of dialogs with content authors, developers, members of the open source community, students, and museum experts to discuss the outreach and programmatic use of digital media and Pachyderm in museums and institutions of higher education.

The focus of the Pachyderm Conference is to bring together authors, developers, and others in an ongoing conversation about how to communicate effectively with digital media. The conference will provide a forum for beginners to learn from established experts, and for those with more advanced skills to exchange ideas and gather inspiration from their peers.

During the conference, attendees will share their experiences and learn from colleagues in a variety of plenary-style sessions, including:

Keynotes: Leaders in the field of digital media will inspire attendees with thought-provoking discussions of current issues and opportunities.
Panel Sessions: Discuss themes from design and creativity to planning and support with museum and higher education leaders.
Conversations with Developers: Find out where Pachyderm is going, help to influence future development work, and meet the people who continue to develop Pachyderm in the open source community.
Showcases: Leading Pachyderm authors will display their work in a Pachyderm Showcase that highlights the variety of disciplines using Pachyderm today.

More information will be available here as planning progresses. Meanwhile, please save the dates, and we look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

2008 NMC Summer Conference Keynote Audio Player

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:58:10 -0700

Here we have assembled in one media player the audio recordings from three of the keynote presentations at the 2008 Summer Conference.

Blogging Questions

Colin Moore — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:48:41 -0700

I’ve been researching student blogging in higher education. I find mainly 3 kinds of university blogging:
1.Student blogs run by either student services or admissions that aim to provide a “window” into student life. I assume that these are supervised in some way. Perhaps the writers are even paid. These exist in abundance.
2.Completely open blog site where anyone can publish are much more rare. These havepolicies but individual blogs don’t seem to be heavily controlled. Examples of this are: University of Minnesota and Case. Otis fits in this category for the moment.
3.Blogging encouraged either by faculty for courses or by the school, but requiring administrative approval and oversight. Often these are run on non-university open platforms.
-- Sue Maberry, Otis College

Phillip Long, MIT
"You may be omitting an important fourth category - sites that are used in coursework but which are restricted to the class, and in some instances restricted further in that the posted blog content may be accessible only to selected parts of a class. However, there is no admin approval or oversight imposed. Those in the class can post what they want without an moderation. The restricted access notion stems from the need in some classes to encourage and support much more open expression without imposing on the writer/blogger the concern that the content is being published to the world - or at least not initially. There may be some post process that the class blogger is asked to consider if there is an interest in wider dissemination of the blog content sot hat the student is given the option of removing or otherwise editing posts before public view (for example at or near the end of the class a page that is public might set up and selected posts moved there for wider dissemination)

In some sense restricted class blogs might seem antithetical to the notion of public blogging, and no doubt it is. However, as a vehicle for blogging as diary concern for who sees what in what form may be an important concern. In our case, we have blogs supported internally both by using the blogging template of a wiki (Confluence in our case), as well as with an internally run blog engine (Movable Type last time I checked).
In reality most of the blogging continues to be done even for courses using externally hosted commercial blogging sites. However, I think there are some of us, at least, who are offering selectively restricted options for privacy considerations using in-house environments.

I would be prepared for the question of what implications are there if/ when the externally used blog is inaccessible (it goes down, or otherwise is unavailable). This might be addressed simply by having the practice established that all blog posts are also maintained as separate local files by the student so that if the unthinkable happens, the blog site you've chosen 'disappears' for whatever reason during the semester, the practice of posting from text written in a local editing environment, mitigates against losing everything until the site returns."

Raymond Riley, Alma College
"Seems to me that this is part of an overall acceptable/responsible use policy. That said, I think it very important to encourage students to be active participants and "prosumers" of web content and media. I tend to agree about moving toward less restrictive measures.
We recently invited Marty Ringle, Chief Technology Officer from Reed College in Oregon, to help us with some long range planning. The computing and web policies outlined at Reed College strike me as a good balance and may be of some help: http://web.reed.edu/cis/policies/index.html "

Steven L. Baron, Mandell Menkes LLC
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a wealth of resources on blogging. Here is a link to its “Bloogers FAQ: Overview of Legal Liability Issues”: http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-overview.php"

Privacy and Google Analytics

Colin Moore — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:28:02 -0700

Someone mentioned Google Analytics at the online conference yesterday (excellent!), and I was wondering what other schools are thinking about the use of it. We've looked into it, but have had some concerns about privacy and submitting all of that traffic data to Google. Are we just being overly paranoid? Have other schools found a peace with this potential breach of privacy? Has anyone seen a clear confidentiality statement regarding what Google is doing with that log data?
-- Elisha Allen UNM

Carrie Schwartz - Tulane
" I use Google analytics for my faculty website to monitor traffic and it has been extremely beneficial to me. "

Christopher Keesey - Ohio University
" Ohio University Without Boundaries utilizes Google Analytics for multiple programs that we offer and we are quite pleased with the value that it adds for supporting marketing planning and implementation decisions with hard data. Your concerns are valid though. Beyond collecting general user and use data on our sites, the real grey line of "evil" or "not evil" is in the ability it gives them to monitor their competitors, giving them a somewhat unfair advantage. Case in point, we use Google Adwords to market some of our programs. We also use Yahoo Marketing. The analytics data gives Google access to the data on visits to our sites coming in from our Yahoo Marketing PPC campaign. The same would go if you employed Microsoft AdCenter for PPC advertising. Pretty sneaky eh?
Here is a blog post by Donna Bogatin taking Avinash Kaushik, a Google Analytics evangelist, to town.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1324 "

Davide Bolchini - Univ. of Lugano
" We use Google Analytics for ca. 50 websites at the University of Lugano, including main faculty websites and it works real good. It is especially beneficial for generating instant-easy-to-read reports, and having webmasters not to bother with the complex reports generated by other tools. "

Myspace and Facebook for Academic Work

Colin Moore — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:20:09 -0700

We are currently teaching an instructional technology and pedagogy seminar for a group of Biology Post-Docs and the question came up regarding "why not use MySpace for course web pages? .
-- Wayne Morse Jr., Emory University

Eric Lee Likness - Rochester
" ...students and faculty may not be familiar with is the use of copyrighted materials within the Myspace/Facebook context. Restricting access is one thing you wouldn't have to the same degree with a Course Management System Internet cul-de-sac."

Christopher Watts - Newell Center for Arts Technology
" I know that several of my colleagues here have met with a negative student reaction to using FaceBook and MySpace (these sites specifically): they find it "creepy" that their professors are on these sites."

John Stafford - Winona State Univ.
" After wading through the tome of lawyers' language, look to near the bottom of each policy statement for the simple, sweeping disclaimer of any responsibility whatsoever by Facebook. "

Further research has many examples of data mining for personal information to participate in the social utility site. " Facebook's enticements to voluntarily submit personal information are relentless. " Attempts to gain personal information are clearly seen when searching for individuals or groups. " We would not require our students to disclose information to marketing enterprises so that the students could use course material. "

Shawn Miller - Center for Instructional Technology
"Anecdotal data seems to suggest that some students really resist the idea of faculty using a social networking tool, one that they've come to love and use personally, for coursework. "
http://cit.duke.edu/help/consult/web20tips.html - resource for faculty interested in using Web 2.0 tools in general

Otto Khera - USC
" We did also examine the possibility of a social network site for teaching and learning, and met with the folks of MySpace a year ago. For all of the reasons mentioned in this thread (privacy issues, copyright infringement risks, and faculty reticence) all contributed to quickly abandoning this strategy. "

William Allen - a state
"Unlike the experience of others, my students were happy to have FB as a class tool. This may have something to do with the fact that our students have near universal disdain for the 20th-Century Bb."

Andy Gruhn - Capella Univ.
" If you're looking for tools to better aggregate content, and update duplicated content across multiple applications, our friend Beth Granter from the University of Sussex sums up options fairly well:
http://bethgranter.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/feed-aggregators/ "

Richard Holeton - Stanford
" BJ Fogg here at Stanford has been using Facebook extensively in his courses related to Facebook "
Teaching & Learning with Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2408370557
Psychology of Facebook
(course by BJ Fogg)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22841903424
Creating apps for Facebook
(previous course by BJ Fogg and Dave McClure)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5378622985

E-Portfolios at Your Institution

Colin Moore — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:13:22 -0700

Johns Hopkins has conducted several eportfolio pilots and is preparing to report on the outcomes with a recommendation on next steps. We'd like to include summaries of eportfolio initiatives at other institutions in the report. If your institution employs eportfolios, would you be willing to reply with the following information?

*Brief overview of how eportfolios are used by faculty and students
*Scope of adoption
*Challenges encountered (aka Lessons Learned)
-- Mike Reese , Johns Hopkins

Andrea Phelps, Carleton College
"1 & 2. Carleton College has eportfolios for the Educational Studies program, which is a fairly small department. They are used primarily by the student teachers, as a combination of the three main categories of eportfolios: Learning, Credential, and Showcase. The main intent is for the portfolios to be Credential, but the professors want the other aspects present as well.
3. Most of the problems we have encountered relate to time and effort: our student teachers are not given the time to really learn how to utilize the more in-depth web tools and have no idea of how to do even basic coding. As a result, they were using a Word HTML template until this year, which is full of problems and was corrupting every time they saved the file. We have now switched to eFolioMN, which is free to Minnesota students and residents, and is simple enough for them to grasp in the short time they have to learn an eportfolio tool, yet allows for a reasonable amount of customization and access control. "

Otto Khera, USC
"* Porfolios Overview: For us, we have been evaluating Blackboard's ePortfolio system connected to its (Xythos) Content Management System. While it's fairly useful in terms of ease-of-use and robustness, the Bb (and likely other course management system-based eportfolios) remain fairly unexciting for the student -- the very person who is interested and has a meaningful stake in how the portfolio represents the person!

As such, we are currently settling on a combination of the Blackboard CMS (Learning System) together with the Movable Type blog, whereby Blackboard serves as the final repository and system of record for digital artifacts (primarily text) and the blog serves as the value-add for the student, and the incentive for producing authentic works -- works that are vetted by knowledge experts and therefore subject to the kind of peer review that encourages quality over quantity and rote fulfillment of assignments.

IDEALLY we at USC would like to leverage Google Apps as an eportfolio tool. Imagine the 'Groups' connected to the enrollment system, and also connected to Blogger, Picasa, Jotspot (now Sites), Mobile, together with the current Apps tools (Gmail, Calendar, IM/GoogleTalk, iGoogle).

We did also look briefly at TaskStream which is used by the California State University system, and others including Otis .. the pricing was too steep and the product was too limited/self contained.

* Scope of Adoption: In the first iteration, we are hoping to include a sizable chunk of the 2000 students who participate in a semester in the College Writing Program. There are 110 sections, each with circa 17 students. Thus, the work flow is critical.

*Challenges/Lessons Learned -- None yet -- but it is likely that students need systems that are portable and enduring beyond the institutional use."

Leysa M. Hassall, IA State
"*Brief overview of how ePortfolios are used by faculty and students: The eDoc electronic portfolio system at ISU features custom-built electronic portfolio templates (we call them "themes"), that are user-driven and designed by participating academic units (Departments, programs, student organizations, etc). Our system is built on open source software and based on uPortal. eDoc electronic portfolios are used for a variety of purposes depending on the academic unit by whom and for whom a theme was developed. eDoc portfolios are used for learning, advisory, course, accreditation, assessment and employment purposes. More information is located here:
http://www.celt.iastate.edu/edoc/
*Scope of adoption differs depending on the participating unit. Our most mature participant, the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition who has implemented ePortfolios across their curriculum boasts of about 800 student users (see more in the attached presentation).

*Challenges encountered - several in fact.
Firstly, our portfolios are created by users, therefore we are constantly reminded of the importance of the participatory design. Our programmer, Dr. Pete Boysen, created a so-called hot potato process that serves as a guide for designing teams. More details can be found here http://www.editlib.org/INDEX.CFM?fuseaction=Reader.PrintAbstract&paper_i d=24798 .
Electronic portfolio development calls for embedded curriculum.
Electronic portfolio development requires active participation of students, faculty members, administrators, and other stakeholders
Electronic portfolios require leveraging grassroots and administrative support (this is actually supported by several researchers). "

Teresa Franklin, Ohio State
"We are using LiveText to prepare standards based portfolio for assessment and to present to our state and national accrediting bodies. Students are implementing the typical kinds of documents to demonstrate the meeting of the standards within their specific discipline as well as the OU College of Education standards and the Ohio Department of Education standards for Teacher Preparation.

All education majors including, technology, counseling, higher education, educational admin have to have a exit portfolio which is a compilation of 4 years of work -- (we start early!)

We had difficulty developing the rubrics to assess the work which would make everyone happy! In the beginning, the faculty somehow thought that students would just know how to create a portfolio and to determine what would go in the portfolio and what wouldn't. So the first year of two was a struggle to come to a common understanding of what really was meant by a 'standards" based portfolio. -- we still have lapses in that area as faculty come and go. We had an extensive 2 year study and tried out several efolio software packages for 2 years before implementing. With NCATE demanding more and more information from us for accreditation, this seems to help us get organized and capture many of the items needed. Our students actually are now trained to use the software and about the process as they enter the college of ed."

André Séguin, Univ. of Ottawa
"Portfolio overview:
The University of Ottawa has been experimenting with e-portfolios with 9 pilot projects over the last 3 years. Our first solution to be tested was the iWebfolio from Nuventive. Our larger groups were, students for our Occupational Therapist program (140), students from our Human Kinetics program (100), our Career Services also looked at how the use of the e-portfolio could impact on their service offer.

We also looked at the open source solution from Sakai, with little success. This solution was more of a LMS than a portfolio. Now we are looking at the Blackboard solution for our Nutrition program. We anticipate about 40 - 50 students in the first year. We have just begun exploring the eFolio solution developed by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.

Scope of adoption
Our Occupational group decided to try developing a portfolio on a memory key for the next year. The rational beings that the solutions proposed were too technologically demanding for profs and students. Other groups will continue to experiment with solutions like Blackboard for the next year.

Challenges
The main challenge found was the limited knowledge of the use of the e-portfolio in teaching. For the next year we plan to develop more training to profs on the following objectives: Understanding what e-portfolio can do in pedagogical approach, show potential use of e-portoflio and demystify the technological aspect. We will also offer guidance to students to better understand the long-term benefits of a portfolio. Providing time to profs is also a major issue."

Nicole Gray, Adobe
Here’s an option to investigate:

Wednesday, July 9 11:00 a.m. PDT
Enhanced Portfolios for Education using Acrobat 9
Learn how Acrobat 9 enables students and faculty to easily organize and collect information from a variety of sources into a rich PDF Portfolio, collaborate and share documents and portfolios in real time and collect and manage feedback into a single PDF document.

http://www.adoberegistrations.com/education/Acrobat9Seminars2008_06/tabi...

Conference Photos

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:04:03 -0700

Enjoy the images of the 2008 NMC Summer Conference in the more than 950 photos taken by attendees who uploaded them to flickr and tagged as nmc2008:

all photos...

Invitation to NMC 2009- Come to Monterey

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:35:26 -0700

As tradition, the closing of one NMC Summer conference ends with an invitation to the next!

From the stage of Alexander Hall at Princeton, John Ittelson and Arlene Krebs from CSU Monterey Bay provided a video overview and glorious sunset embossed invitation to entice people to come west in 2009 for the next NMC Summer Conference.

Get Flash to see this player.

What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:25:55 -0700

Closing Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

New media technologies make it easy for us to circulate, appropriate, transform, and recirculate media content on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the mythology of MIT that young people learn to become engineers by taking apart household gadgets and putting them back together again. Can we say the same thing about contemporary artists and humanists — that they learn by breaking down and remixing elements of their own culture? We falsify the creative process when we teach young people that great art comes from single and isolated intellects rather than emerging from the creative engagement with and appropriation from older cultural traditions.

In this presentation, Jenkins will address the ways that contemporary remix culture — whether embodied in music, You Tube videos, or fan fiction — forces us to reconsider older forms of cultural appropriation. Drawing on materials being developed by MIT’s Project NML, this presentation will explore the concept of “new media literacies” and explain why we see appropriation as a core cultural competency for the 21st century. Jenkins will explore how this concept might shake up how we teach traditional literary texts like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, how we respond to contemporary youth culture, and how we talk to young people about the ethical dimensions of their relationship to media content.

Presentation available as:

Sonic Foundry Mediasite video and slides (available through July 30, 2008)
Mediasite archive on nmc web (Windows only)
Quicktime video on nmc web (129 Mb Mb, 1:04:11)
MP3 audio on nmc web (58.8 Mb, 1:04:11)

Where Do We Go? - Lennon Bus Video

Alan Levine — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:31:10 -0700

The John Lennon Bus was special feature at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference, where conference participants had opportunities to tour the bus and even get their own 15 minute session to record a sound loop. A special one day workship was made available for conference participants who signed up on our wiki; 7 participants were chosen to spend a full day experience where they recorded a song and created a video.

At the closing session, everyone at the conference got to see the video Where do We Go created by the group known as the "Digital Philosophers"

Get Flash to see this player.

The Digital Philosophers include:

Neil Gomes (vocals)
Nita Paul (vocals)
Grover Saunders (drums)
Susan Fou (keyboard)
Andy Curran (guitar)
Jay Field (guitar)
Randy J. Malta (bass)

If you like the video, it is also available in ipod format (25.3 Mb .m4v, 2:38)

Casio's got a brand new cam - how many images per second would you like?

Keene Haywood — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:21:34 -0700

Digital cameras. Everyone seems to have one, and boy aren't they great! Instant gratification. But can your still or video camera shoot 1200 frames per second? Uhhh probably not. Casio realized this little gap in the market and recently released their EX-F1. Its not a budget camera coming in at $1000 msrp, but what you get for that money is something that would have cost much more way back in 2007. It also packs essentially two high speed cameras in one, providing both still and video capture abilities. This is something that is more and more common in prosumer and consumer digital still cameras. This camera has the unique ability (for now) to capture extremely slow motion imagery at up to 60 frames per second for still imagery and an eye-popping 1200 fps in its movie mode. It can also capture video at 300 fps and 600 fps. The trade-off for such stunning effects is resolution. The 1200 fps mode gives you an image that is only 336 x 96 pixels. Shooting at 600 fps gives you a 432 x 192 pixel image and at 300 fps the image is 512 x 384 pixels. So these are not movies you would want to display on your 50" plasma TV. But, despite the image size compromise, you gain an almost unprecedented ability to capture imagery in a consumer camera that the naked eye could not perceive. The results are very, very cool and interesting. I suggest you take a look at the samples at Casio's website and prepare to be a little astounded. Even the small images shot in the 1200 fps mode are cool to watch on a computer screen. And in case anyone forgets, the camera also shoots stills, which is its primary function. The 6 megapixel camera can snap up to 60 images per second, which is also not too shabby. All of this high speed, slow mo imagery is done with the help of a single high-speed CMOS 1/1.8" sensor. It offers 12x optical zoom and can shoot in RAW mode along with the ubiquitous JPEG. All of this is very nice. In case anyone decides they would rather shoot more "normal" looking video, the camera can deliver HD resolution video at 30 fps (1280 × 720) and 60 fps (1920 × 1080). Video is captured in MOV format using H.264/AVC and IMA-ADPCM (stereo) audio. As if all of this was not enough, Casio offers an Other Functions link at the camera's international website. It has a best shot feature, face detection, auto bracketing and multiple recording modes (including all manual).

For institutions and departments that do work in the visual arts, this camera may well be worth a hard look. It offers some truly innovative and unique features for capturing imagery that can be used in disciplines ranging from engineering to anthropology.

Complete tech specs can be found here.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)

hardware, imagery